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Hard Drives Evaluated for Noise, Heat and Performance
Sander Sassen writes "Ever wondered what harddisks offer the best combination of performance and low noise? Hardware Analysis evaluates all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks and focuses on noise, heat production and overall performance. Their results show that 7200-rpm spindle speed is no guarantee for high-performance and that low-noise and high-performance is not an impossible combination with some harddisks."
It's about damned time. We have more than enough reviews on speed and performance, but there is a serious dearth of information on noise.
Fastest. Slashdotting. Ever.
Seagate's Barracuda IV drives are great! Exceptionally quiet (the CPU cooling fan generates more noise) and I've not run across a single failure in ~100 sold.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
If you're looking for a good 7200-rpm harddisk then look no further than the Western Digital WD800BB, with 2MB cache, just a tad bit slower than the WD800JB which features 8MB of cache. The surprising newcomer is the Samsung SP8004H that scores well on all fronts and certainly deserves your attention too.
Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
If you're however looking for a harddisk that offers an impressive combination of performance and low noise then look no further than Seagate's ST380021A Barracuda IV, it really is an engineering marvel that combines the best of both worlds. No match for the IBM or Western Digital but a fair trade-off between performance and noise level.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.
So this sort of review is wonderful, both for the information it provides, and for encouraging manufacturers to pay attention to these factors so that they will look good in the future.
Good thing they did that report so they know what to replace their current drives with when we get done burning all their motors up.
I'll bet that server is making some noise right now. WHHHHHHHRRRRRRR!!! *snap, crackle, pop*
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
This is a timely article, what with hard drive warranties having just been bumped from three years to one in a few of the leading brands (including Maxtor). Word is the WD w/ 8 meg cache still has 3 years.
If you've ever played Dungeon Siege, you'll be familiar with the occasional sluggish framerate drop when you get near a new area, and the game starts dynamically loading the artwork and terrain resources for that area, giving the game its contiguous feel. Now I understand that SCSI hard drives have the ability to do non-blocking reads and writes, meaning that the CPU is able to keep processing while waiting for data from the hard drive. If what I think is true, then if I had a SCSI drive and played Dungeon Siege, the sluggishness when it loads new data would not occur, since the game would keep playing while it took a few seconds to load the data in the background.
If this isn't true... then wouldn't it be cool if hard drives could do this? Having games get sluggish every time they have to load new artwork resources from disk is annoying as hell.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
After all, when I use my PC, I'm plugged into a pair of headphones. Any noise my box makes is easily filtered out if not drowned out entirely. I don't work inside a data center (unlike some of my fellows), so moderation of headphone volume is the only thing I need to consider when I protect my hearing. PC and Harddrive noise shouldn't matter...
That is, until I decided to put together a multimedia PC for use in my living room. A 52x CD spin-up is painfully loud during the quiet moments during a movie or my favorite anime. Don't even ask me about a hard-drive wake-up grind or cooling fans.
In the end, my option was to hide the PC behind a soft fabric cover rather than to try to diminish the noise from the box.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?
I recently heard the sad tale of someone whose box was blown by lightning :( and of course they wondered if the drive was okay.
on plugging the drive into another motherboard, murphy's law kicked in, and he was the proud owner of another dead motherboard.
So are there test rigs that will allow for testing of drives at a basic level so that motherboards are not used as fuses? Probable uses include IT shops and repair shops.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I personally care a lot about noise. I pick out my CPU fans, Hard drives and power supply/case fans based on "Which, under X decibals, provides the very best performance?". The difference between 99th percentile of cooling performance and 80th percentile usually means about 50% less noise with CPU fans.
Regardless of the current statistics, I think that hard drives have come a long way as far as noise production. I remember on a lot of my old PC's the huge amount of noise some of the hard-drives (old WD's and Maxtor's) used to make. I never needed to check the little indicator light to tell when my hard drive was whizzing away, you could hear it from the next room.
I probably won't buy a hard-drive based on noise-factor (or possibly heat factor) alone if the price difference is significant. After the drives of 10 years back, most current models hum like music. When it's just humming away (no data-access clicking), the sound of a hard-drive can actually be somewhat relaxing.
On an contrary note: I once worked in a testing lab that had about 40+ machines. When they were all running, the room hummed, but the noise was somewhat subliminal. Walking out of the room into a busy office, you definately noticed an increase in noise. On days I worked overtime however, leaving the lab to dead silence was quite noticable... I almost missed the conforting hum sometimes.
Noise ratings on scanners/printers/CD-ROMS would be nice. These tend to be a lot more irritating than hard drives. Anyone know a site?
Equally surprising was the performance of Western Digital's 400AB and 800AB, both 5400-rpm harddisks showed exceptional performance on par with all but the fastest 7200-rpm harddisks. If you're looking for an affordable, high-performance and yet silent 5400-rpm harddisk either of these will fit your needs exactly.
I have setup many systems (mainly Dells) that ship with Western Digital HDs. A large number of those drives failed very soon thereafter. When Dell came to replace the drives, they were replaced with Maxtors.
Also, here is a snippet from Gibson Research regarding their SpinRite product.
Note: We no longer purchase Western Digital drives, even though their retail point of sale packaging is pretty and the drives are inexpensive. We decided that reliability is more important than a pretty box and saving a few bucks, so we've switched over to Quantum drives exclusively, and have been having much better luck ... so far.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
I wonder what their server's harddisk temperature is right now... did they actually post this to slashdot on purpose?
Sadly, the site has been slashdotted into oblivion, so I need the help of those who have seen the site. I miss the cicada like whining of the drive from my old vaxstation, which drive would help bring back that sense of nostalgia? Also, extra heat output would be great since it is almost winter again here in the states.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Why not develop a speedy drive that can slow itself down if it starts to generate too much heat or if it's not being used (as opposed to shutting it completely off)? I assume it's probably much easier to create a single speed motor than a variable speed one, but what would the disadvantages be?
;)
Of course there may not be any true advantages to such a thing either, although I tend to think that if could run about 4 times faster than normal for 10 second while it loads a single big file it might be worth it. There's also a chance that these alredy exist and I'm just out of the loop
Has anyone built a case that wasn't made out of thin sheets of metal? What if you made a case filled with sound insulation such as styrofoam or eggshell foam, leaving only the air intake/exhaust vents exposed?
Seems to me that so much money is being spent on making PC components quiet, presumably so we can nuzzle our faces next to the motherboard and take a nap, but why can't we just isolate the sound inside the box? It's my -novice- understanding of airflow design that little or no heat is dissipated by using a metal box; the heat is transfered through the moving air. Well, keep the air moving and soundproof the case.
Is this a stupid idea? Maybe it's like my idea to make a solar powered, weather balloon lifted, permanently high altitude platform for launching space missions - a fool proof and economical plan for capitalist conquest! I just need to develop an attention span and find some fundin-- HEY! Something shiny!
storagereview.com
Huge database of very indepth reviews on hard drives. Scsi, ide, 5400-15000rpm.. Basically everything, with noise, temperature, and a few different benchmarks for different usage conditions.
Definatly the best resource I've found for hard drive tests. I always consult this site before a hard drive purchase.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
One thing that could be improved on many of these quantitative reviews is if they quit relying upon surface temperature probes (which is HORRIBLY unreliable. A slightly grainy texture would make the drive appear much cooler because of reduced heat transfer), and instead go right to the source: Power consumption. Is it so hard to measure the current on the 5 and 12V inputs, and deriving an actual power consumption metric for the drive? Not only is this valuable as it absolutely directly relates to heat, but it additionally is useful for those building low power rigs.
Anyways, just a thought.
Earth, 1956 AC, IBM 305 RAMAC:
The 350 Disk File consisted of a stack of fifty 24" discs that can be seen to the left of the operator in the above picture. The capacity of the entire disk file was 5 million 7-bit characters, which works out to about 4.4 MB in modern parlance. This is about the same capacity as the first personal computer hard drives that appeared in the early 1980's, but was an enormous capacity for 1956. IBM leased the 350 Disk File for a $35,000 annual fee.
I'm one of the growing number of people who have an entire TERABYTE -- yes, an entire TERABYTE of hard drives; 9 Western Digital Special Edition 120GB's, to be exact, for $1500 total.
:)
I've downloaded and installed EVERYTHING (6 different OS's, too) I can find and so far have used only about 800GB or so
I'm glad they're starting to review noise as a factor, since with the extra cooling installed, the computer sounds almost like a vacuum cleaner, especially with the 550W power supply it takes to power the things. The drives individaully would be really quiet, but with all the cooling and such I have installed, it's almost as loud as this miniature fan I keep nearby.
The fans drown out the crunching when people are grabbing everything off every hd on p2p programs, but all the noise is still worth it when I can call forth any song, music video, movie, or just about anything else at a whim.
Honestly - I do not feel the need of anything faster than the slowest 5400 RPM HDD for now - my PC has gobloads of RAM and I can make use 128MB-per-HDD as buffer. Easily.
What worries me is, the faster you spin, the more catastrophic a failure is.
What I DO care about, is reliability and shock resistance. If anyone sells a reliable HDD that would survive 5-inch drop and still operate with all my data intact, I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
Compared to my data, the HDD and the theoretical time that can be saved with higher speed worth REALLY little. Almost nothing.
XML causes global warming.
Why hasn't anyone developed a device that has DIMM slots for PCXXXX RAM and an IDE/Firewire/USB interface on it?
Seems like that would be the way to go... stick a battery on it, and give it an external power supply... then you have VERY fast and extremely reliable storage. (As long as it is powered).
I have had enough hard drives fail that I would love to have one... maybe once MRAM comes out these devices will start popping up.
Ryan
IntroductionBy: Sander Sassen
A modern harddisk is not that different, mechanically, from the first generation of harddisks that debuted with the IBM PC in the '80s. Today's harddisks are also mechanical parts that use spinning platters and read/write heads to store or read information from them. That also explains why harddisks haven't seen the rapid pace of innovation as for example CPUs have; simply because the mechanics are holding the harddisk back from making similar leaps in performance. But to be honest that's not entirely accurate, modern harddisks could be substantially faster, but not without either driving up the price significantly or introducing unwanted side effects.
One of these side effects is excessive noise; because a harddisk has a number of spinning and moving parts it is virtually impossible to make a harddisk noiseless. Anything you'll do to counter the noise will either influence the performance, drive up the price, or make the harddisk physically larger. For example one way to reduce the noise would be to reduce the rpm of the platters which would mean we'd end up with a slower harddisk overall. And vice versa, by increasing the rpm of the platters we'll get a better performing harddisk but the noise level will also increase.
Naturally we could counter the noise production by adding sound insulation. Unfortunately insulation is not the preferred way of tackling the noise production as it'll make the harddisk physically larger, and thus leave less room for storage capacity. Furthermore it also works as an insulator for the heat produced by the harddisk, which would then cut into the harddisk's MTBF, Mean Time Before Failure. That actually brings us to the second unwanted side effect of high-performance harddisks and that's excessive heat production.
Modern IDE harddisks feature platters that revolve at either 5400 or 7200-rpm and thus revolve at about half the speed of the fastest SCSI harddisks that top out at 15.000-rpm. The main difference is that these SCSI harddisks are used in professional applications such as database servers where noise- and heat production are second to performance, and thus these levels are substantially higher than consumer level products. In consumer level PCs however heat production is becoming an increasingly important issue. PCs continue to get smaller and CPUs on average dissipate more than 50-watts of heat, so the system temperature will rise significantly if a harddisk is mounted with excessive heat production. In the following pages we'll take a look at all recent 5400 and 7200-rpm harddisks from IBM, Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung with a focus on noise and heat production as well as overall performance.
Next >>
"[7200 rpm disks] are generally too costly, or a bit overkill, for mundane office applications such as word processing or sending emails"
I'm having enough trouble just finding 5400 rpm disks. The performance (speed-wise) is more than enough for me, and I'd rather go with cool and quiet. The cost difference between 5400 and 7200 drives is marginal (a few bucks).
The thing is, there aren't many 5400 rpm disks around anymore and only sizes up to 80 GB. I'd rather have one big disk than two or three small ones (both heat and noise adds up), but I can't find any 5400 rpm disks at, say, 120GB or so, while 7200 rpm disks are available up to 200GB or so. And as long as the 7200 rpm drives are as hot and noisy as they are, I would rather have 5400 rpm disks.
Perhaps there are larger 5400 rpm disks, but I have yet to see them at any reseller nearby.
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
....when the sounds of IBM's 20MB drive reading or writing could be felt in your teeth...
Ahh, those were the days.
It's interesting how anecdotal (but informed) evidence like this always seems to run from absolute bad to absolute good.
Back in the Good Old Days, I worked for an engineering firm that had a Northstar mini with a CP/M console. The console talked to the Northstar and made paper tapes that would be fed into CNC machines to make big steel widgets. It took 8-inch floppies. Other support boxes took 5.25-inch floppies.
At one point we started to have constant data failures on the Verbatim floppies we were using. Disks would just die, or would not take a write the first time. We kept throwing them out, and went through cases of them. Eventually we threw out the rest of the boxes of verbatim and switched to Dysan and the problems just went away.
Of course, I never used Verbatim again. I won't even use their optical media.
I now assume that this was just one of those truly random, "Estimated Mean Time Between Failures" issues, and not everyone was experiencing such a high failure rate.
I mean, I've been using the same two Western Digital drives for years now. Right now, one of my years-old 2Gb drives is in my firewall/webserver where it gets daily constant abuse. We've also used them at work, and they don't seem to fail more than the other brands we have.
-- clvrmnky
Noise means that energy is being wasted somewhere and is created by vibration. Although the relationship may not be simple, you might expect that the lower noise a drive has, the better its reliability. As an example, a fluidic bearing should be quieter than a ball bearing because there are no parts showing a combination of rolling, sliding and knocking between clearances.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
And they include heat and noise reports in their excellent reviews. Highly recommended for any HDD purchase.
Uh, no. I have a couple of servers for which I just need a bunch of space. I don't give a DAMN about performance; they could all be ATA-33 for all I care. I want them quiet, cool, and reliable. /.'d anymore.)
It's about time someone did this review (hopefully someday soon I'll be able to read it, when it's not
Forgive me if I'm missing the point, but I can't see that choosing a hard disk on its noise production is in any way sensible.
Noise is damned important in many applications. TiVo, for instance, needs lots of capacity, but speed is not a critical issue. Any modern 5,400RPM drive is more than sufficient. Who wants to watch a movie and listen to a loud whine from a disc drive? Also, since TiVos tend to live in "entertainment centers" and have limited cooling, heat is a big concern.
Another good example is my firewall machine. It runs my mail server, FTP server, and web server. It performs NAT for my network. The a-number-1 thing that I want from that machine (outside of reliability) is quiet. None of the applications on that machine get much action. My web server is a private page that lets me look at my system temperatures and voltages -- so it does not generate a lot of hits. The mail server serves me and a few freinds. But the machine is in my office running 24/7. I don't want to hear a loud hard drive, nor do I want to put six fans in the case to extract heat. So I run a slow, low wattage Duron (650mhz) and a 20GB, 5,400RPM hard drive.
It's all additive. The machine on which I work is loud enough because of my "need-for-speed." It's got multiple fans, hard drives, etc. And it sounds like it. The quieter I can make the other machines, the better off I will be.
{* Disclaimer - if you accidentally duct tape your CPU fan and your PSU inlets, please try and smother the flames with your body because (1) No one else should be hurt because of your "specialness", and (2) You'll be doing all of us a favour. Either way, don't blame me. *}
The easiest fix: Take some foam padding, preferably the antistatic kind that most hardware ships in these days, and line your case panels with a layer or two. It'll cut down on a good portion of the noise, and it'll improve your airflow (you didn't really think that air was supposed to go through those decorative holes, did you?) Be sure to keep it thin on the back side, next to the mobo. I know it says antistatic on the box, but do you really want anything touching your mobo?
Next, replace your damn PSU. Standard ones are way too damn noisy. I don't have any links handy (I'm at work), but they are plentiful and easy to find. Oh, and say "damn" alot. It helps.
Getting more in-depth, remove your peripheral drives (CD, HD, etc), and put them back in with rubber washers both between the drive and case, and between the screw and case. It cuts down on vibrations significantly.
Tie up your loose cables. Sounds silly, but I've found that in several systems with significant airflow, they were either moving around or causing turbulence. Either make or buy rounded IDE cables for the best flow.
If you have a very noisy harddrive, yank it from that small and normally loose 3 1/2" bracket and put it in one of your 5 1/4" bays with the help of drive brackets. Insulate around it with antistatic foam padding, use rubber washers, put an ultraquiet mini fan behind it, set to pull air(that old socket 7 fan you have lying around will do just fine). Finally, remove the bezel in front of it, drill some small holes for airflow, insulate with foam padding (remove the padding around the holes ((yes, it is sad that I have to point that out)) ), and pop it back in. Voila! Thicker padding to cut down on sound, it's in the 5 1/4" drive section, which I find is much sturdier and less prone to rattle, and the fan will keep it cooler than it would have been before.
Consider dropping that 52x CD. Sure, it's impressive, but you install all your games with max install, right? (right??) Or better yet, go buy software that will copy your CD to the HD and then subst the directory to a drive letter. Voila! CD at HD speeds. Replace the 52 with something more conservative, and you'll notice a big difference (and lower spinup time)
crud, "subst", I just dated myself...
Consider spring-mount screws for your case fans. I have a whole bag of them, but I'll be darned if I can remember who made them. They're basically just a short metal or plastic spring with a screw at each end. One end screws into the hole on the fan, the other into the case, voila, instant buffer against vibrations.
If things are still too bad for you, consider an external case mod. The quietest I ever did was to replace all of the metal panels on the case with 1/2" beechwood (damn, but it was pretty), but not all of us have the time and patience to work up something like that. The easiest is to take your panels off, and slap some starch/water paste on them. Next, take some thick cloth (or a few layers of thin cloth, if you feel the need to be difficult), load it up with the paste, and then just slap it on your panel. Make sure it's all wrinkly and folded n' chit. Let it dry, and the cloth should stick on just fine, adding another layer of sound barrier for ya. DISCLAIMER 1: This has been known not to stick on some of the new, shiny, smooth cases. DISCLAIMER 2: Take the panels off of your PC BEFORE you start slathering them with starch. Or, at the very least, remember to turn your PC off first. ;-)
Finally, try putting your PC on a phone book or something similar. Sounds silly, but it dulls the noise that resonates into the floor/desk. If it makes a difference for you, then build something more permanant for your case to sit on (or, at the very least, give it some ultracool extra-long legs like the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.... complete with little lazer guns on the CD drive... )
Lastly, note that a heckuvalot of the noise you hear could be from your monitor, too. But I will avoid monitor mods for today, lest some yahoo stick a phillips through his tube and show up at my doorstep, ready to share the tale. (it's happened, and I swear he was still smoking).
Hope this helps!
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Why is it that all of these manufacturers use the same 5400 and 7200 rpm speeds for their drives? Why couldn't one manufacturer put out their drives at, say, 6000 and 8000 rpm (from a marketing standpoint, this would be beneficial: kind of like Intel using MHz as a benchmark for comparative "performance" against AMD).
Is there a good reason for this uniformity across manufacturers? Do they use the same motors from a 3rd party supplier? What gives?
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Er, If I'm planning on using the drive as part of my audio/video system at home (TV tuner, MP3 player, personal video recorder) then noise is THE most importantant consideration!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The most quiet drives, the seagate Barracuda IV atas have a problem in Raid configurations. When used in a Raid configuration, the performance is less than a single drive by itself. Raid is not officially supported by this drive. More here.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Since things seem to be getting bogged down on Hardware Analysis's end, here are two mirrors:
1. Earlham College
2. UW-Madison
These are in PDF format, which I converted from the printable HTML provided on the website. It is missing one eye-candy picture of a hard-drive's interior.
I'm sleeping on top of my computer (bed over desk) with the PC sitting on the desk (Bigtower). Fans, IBM 40 gig, Maxtor 80 gig, acoustics management turned off. Never experienced any problems to sleep.
Your mileage may vary, of course. :-)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Because I tried looking them up, and some manufacturers sound sane. Others do not. 5400 and 7200 rpm drawing the *same* power? 1, 2 and 3 platter disks drawing the same? WTF. Seriously, putting a simple ampmeter in there would be great data.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS
Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Something I am surprised nobody has brought up yet is that the frequency of noise which a drive produces is as important (if not more) than the absolute sound pressure level of the noise.
Human ears are more sensitive to midrange sounds and high-frequency noise tends to be more grating than lower frequency "whooshes" at the same sound pressure level.
Much like higher revving engines, higher RPM drives naturally produce higher-frequency noise, so 37dB on a 15k RPM drive (e.g. newest Seagate Cheetah) will typically be more noticeable than 37dB on a 7200rpm drive (older IBM 75GXP drives).
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Go, learn a little about noise-related fatigue. If your work environment has a high background noise level, you'll be too tired to work effectively. Doesn't matter how quick your system is if you're too tired to use it properly.
This gets worse in open office spaces; by the time you add up aircon, hard drives, printers, monitor whine, it's all nasty.
As I'm sure is the case for quite a few other people who decided to take on a little bit of overclocking, I must say "What HD?". You mean that very faint whirring I hear when I turn my computer on before the 50 dB rocket engine I have strapped to my CPU spins up? Oh how I would love to get the same cooling effect I have now with only the noise of a few HDs, I think I would have to kiss someone. P.S. I think I'm going deaf (moreso in the ear closer to the computer
I think they way they measured heat was a little strange. They just ran it in an open room and measured the temperature of the top of the drive. Why didn't they just measure the total power used during the test hour. That seems easier and more accurate to me.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
I just gave W.D. all sorts of grief over this warranty change (as a long-time customer and occasional reseller who uses W.D. exclusively). Their response was that it was to compensate for the shrinking margins on sales. I'll be very surprised if prices go down one cent as a result of the reduced warranty coverage.
In my experience, most HDs fail either almost right away or after a long hard life of 5+ years, so it's not truly all that relevant -- but a three year warranty tells me that they believe in their own product enough to back it that long. Reducing the warranty gives me, and my clients, the impression that the drives are not as reliable as before. This is a DISincentive to buy a new or additional drive, especially if the existing HD is still chugging away.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Try being a student in a dorm or living in a single studio apartment. When I do a large download, I like to sleep well at night while my computer silently hums away.
http://saveie6.com/
Most drives get noisier over time. I've had many drives that were nearly silent when I purchased them, but after not much time they start to get noticeably louder, until they're unbearable. Especially Maxtor. :> Anyway, since this article (and all the others that I've seen) don't address noise levels after a month or six, they're really not all that helpful.
I've given up trying to find a quiet enough drive for my living room and just put the living room system in another room (the basement) with long cables. It's a bit awkward (though will be better once I acquire an external DVD-RW) but a much simpler solution.
Know where I can get quiet power supplies? What brand+models are quiet?
My current one isn't that noisy but it's an old one for the days of the P3.
The recent 350W and 400W power supplies for P4s/Athlons PCs seem to have roaring fans.
Link.
"Noise, Heat, and Performance"
...factors that make a good relationship.
And just when we installed a new box with dual 1.3GHz CPUs, 240GB of RAID0+1 storage and 1GB of RAM (see here) and thought we were ready for just about anything the Slashdot Mob comes along and brings it down to it's knees!
Thanks guys, I'm happy to report the server pulled through although we had to limit the no. of simul. connects to keep things afloat. We'll be going over the server logs today to see where there's room for improvement, as there's some parameters we'd like to change in order to handle such loads better in the future.
Thanks and kind regards,
Sander Sassen
Email: ssassen@hardwareanalysis.comVisit us at: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com
The IBM 120GXP (IC35L120) in the test supports this, and this implies that Seagate are doing this kind of "seek shaping" now and plan to extend the facility to OEMs, so that they can customize acoustic performance for the application e.g. PVR. Where possible, the review tests should have been done using either extreme. (They don't say whether the drives were seeking during the noise test, though. I hope they were, otherwise the noise tests would be half-baked.)
(this is not a
Even if /. were to run a poll, that wouldn't tell you squat. Basic psychology: people are *much* more likely to report negative results than positive results, so the poll will show that *all* hard drives are absolute crap.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
Not quite. If there's 8 poll slots and four manufacturers: Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, Seagate, the question can be posed as Which Hard Drives Fail On You Most Often?
M+WD
M+I
M+S
WD+I
WD+S
S+I
If the IBM choices get the least votes then that's the most reliable. Option 7 can be: Samsung drives fail me all the time you insensitive clod. Option 8: Cowboy Neal carries my glorious Samsung drives for me.
The idea is to have something so the you do not have to burn a ten dollar bill every time you do a test.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"